It was 10pm and Tracey had already showered and was ready for bed at her home at the southern tip of the island when the call came through.
A “wild steer” was loose on the road at Puriri Bay, several kilometres away. So she got back into her work clothes, climbed into the Ford Ranger and headed out into the rain.
For the next 45 minutes, we walked around in the pitch black and drizzle looking for the elusive cow.
It is the sort of call that gives a glimpse into the reality of being Great Barrier Island’s sole animal management officer.
Tracey is responsible for animal management from south to north, working largely on her own and often well beyond her rostered hours.
Her contracted 40-hour week can become 60 hours, and the job does not always stop when the rostered day does.
“Seven days a week, 24 hours,” she says. “Even when I’m not working, you know, I’m putting cattle back into a paddock or contacting somebody about something.”
A typical day starts at 7am with a patrol, before she checks for jobs that have come in overnight. She then has to find somewhere with Wi-Fi to do the paperwork, because there is no office for her on the island, before heading back out to deal with whatever the day brings.
The workload is substantial. From January 2025 to April this year, Tracey dealt with 750 animal management jobs, including 68 unregistered dogs, 31 roaming dogs, 99 bylaw breaches and 20 general animal welfare cases.
From May to the end of July this year, there were another 159 jobs, including 29 unregistered dogs, 20 bylaw breaches, 15 warnings, seven roaming stock jobs, five roaming dogs, two aggressive dog behaviour cases and two dog attacks.
That represents a noticeable uptick in serious dog-related incidents in the last three months, and Tracey says it has made her more vigilant in how she responds to reports and roaming animals.
The numbers help explain why the job is becoming more difficult, but they do not capture the amount of time Tracey spends trying to prevent those incidents from happening in the first place.
A large part of that work is education.
She has worked with the island’s three schools teaching children about dog behaviour, beach rules and what it means to be a responsible dog owner.
She has organised a two-day Doggy Day Out, where dog owners could get information about the Dog Control Act and local bylaws, register dogs at a discounted rate and have them microchipped for free.
Donated dog food, leads, collars and blankets were handed out, while DOC, bird-aversion facilitators, animal homeopathy practitioners and other members of the community contributed to the event.
The event even finished with a game of netball involving animal management staff, DOC staff and local iwi.
Tracey has also worked with the local board on how beach rules are communicated and understood, particularly in areas like Medlands.
The aim, she says, is to build relationships so that enforcement is not the first interaction people have with animal management.
That education work is particularly important on Medlands Beach.
One afternoon, we encounter two dachshund-type dogs bounding in and out of the sand dunes off lead and into areas where dogs are supposed to be on lead.
Those dunes are not arbitrary.
They are habitat for nesting seabirds including dotterels and oystercatchers, and the different beach zones reflect a mix of ecological protection and community input. Tracey says the challenge is that not everyone who had a stake in those decisions engaged at the time, and she is often left to explain the outcome after the fact.
Tracey approaches the owners and explains the restrictions.
They are not particularly pleased and want to know where the signs are.
It is an interaction that gets to one of the frustrations she sees regularly: people questioning new rules they did not engage with during consultation, but are now expected to follow.
“There’s been a year of education around it,” she says.
She says people still tell her they do not understand the rules, or believe she is responsible for creating them.
“I think they believe that I’m actually making them up.”
The reality is there was very little engagement from the community, with just one person attending one of the consultation sessions on the rule changes that introduced further restrictions on where dogs can be off-leash on beaches.
The difficulty is that she is the person standing in the middle of that gap between council rules, community expectations and what people actually understand when they arrive at the beach.
Two days later, the consequences of that gap become brutally apparent.
A miniature poodle is mauled by a Staffordshire-type dog on Medlands Beach.
The poodle had been walking with its owner and another dog on lead. The owner was on the boardwalk when she saw dogs off lead and stopped.
One of the dogs saw her dog from around 150 metres away and came running towards them.
It pinned the poodle to the ground.
The woman intervened to get the attacking dog off, while its owner was still further down the beach.
By the time Tracey arrived, the attacking dog and its owner had left.
The poodle initially appeared to have little more than a scratch, but when it reached the vet the wound was found to be deep.
Tracey stayed with the shaken owner, took a preliminary statement and checked in with her again later that evening. She met her early the following morning to take a formal statement and later stopped at the vet to help with the injured dog.
“The wound was quite significant,” she says. “Quite deep and needed 11 staples to close it.”
It is incidents like this that have shifted Tracey from four years of primarily educating people towards more formal enforcement.
“Some people have already been warned at least two to three times, and they haven’t changed their behaviour.”
One of the biggest misunderstandings is what it actually means for a dog to be under control.
For Tracey, it comes down to responsiveness and the ability to act immediately if needed — a dog that is close enough to its owner that it can be reliably called back or clipped onto a lead without delay.
Dogs rushing at people can also become an issue.
“Any dog that approaches a person and barks can be seen as being aggressive behaviour,” she says. “Sometimes it’s not. It’s just hello.”
But people have different experiences with dogs, and a large animal running towards someone can be frightening even if the dog is friendly.
“Every person has different experiences with dogs.”
Tracey says that is particularly important for an ageing island population.
“We’ve got an ageing population. So I would love to know that we have compliant dog owners so that elderly people can actually go for a walk at the beach without fear of a big dog running up or tripping them up.”
Then there are the dogs that are not just frightening, but physically difficult to deal with.
On another callout, we encounter an enormous Newfoundland on the road that initially looks like a calf.
It is standing on a blind corner and is so large that the catch pole cannot fit around its neck.
Tracey tracks down the owners through social media after learning the dog is unregistered.
They insist the dog is sweet and harmless.
But when Tracey approaches, it growls.
It takes around 20 minutes to get close enough to secure it, with treats helping to settle the animal.
“The dog growled when it saw me.”
The question is not whether the dog is normally gentle.
It is what happens when an animal that size is loose on a road, around a blind corner, with vehicles coming through.
“It was so big that it could run past and you could lose your footing and fall down into the road, or you’d have to jump up the bank onto the high side.”
That is where being a sole-charge officer becomes particularly difficult.
Tracey has a Ford Ranger, a body-worn camera and her equipment.
What she does not have is another animal management officer physically beside her.
“It would be nice to have a co-worker at hand or physically here on the island with me to obviously bounce off each other in terms of the difficulty and the nature of some of the jobs that I do have to go to.” she says.
“So yeah, it’s very isolating.”
On the night of the wild steer callout, Tracey had already finished for the day.
But a cow on the road is a potential danger to motorists, and she says she feels responsible when people call her about roaming stock.
“I would hate for someone to run into that steer or cow that’s on the road, because I feel responsible.”
“If somebody’s contacting me saying, ‘There’s a black cow, steer, bull in the middle of the road, someone’s going to get really hurt’, I am going to go to it.”
Moving stock is not always straightforward.
Tracey says she may have little more than a piece of pipe to move cattle and, working alone, cannot safely chase them far from the road network.
The priority is getting animals off the road quickly and safely so traffic is not put at risk.
That sense of responsibility has led Tracey into the work that goes well beyond issuing warnings and infringements.
She has worked with local farmers to improve fencing and says one long-running roaming-stock problem that had lasted 17 years was finally resolved after working with a farmer to repair their fences.
She works with DOC, bird-rescue volunteers and bird-aversion facilitators on wildlife protection, in addition to Oruawharo Medlands Ecovision on protecting the nesting birds at Medlands.
She also helps local police with dog-related callouts and properties they cannot safely access because of dogs.
And when people can no longer afford to keep their dogs, she helps find them new homes, including working with Barrier Air to provide free transport to the mainland.
Over one two-week period, four dogs were abandoned, including a 10-month-old mastiff that was too large for its new carer to control.
Tracey helped find homes for the dogs, including arranging for one to go to a mainland shelter. In another case, she approached the SPCA about taking 10 puppies from the island, with the puppies eventually transported to the mainland, and finding homes.
The work is not strictly part of enforcing the Dog Control Act, but it has become part of the job she does to prevent unwanted animals from becoming another problem for the community.
Most recently she worked with the local board to organise financial assistance for desexing.
The programme is now underway to help desex between 20 and 30 dogs on the island, aimed particularly at preventing unwanted litters.
The work can involve some confronting welfare cases.
One of the worst Tracey remembers involved a dog that had been attacked by another dog and then left locked inside a car for about a week and a half.
The wound had grown to almost the size of a dinner plate.
By the time Tracey got the dog to a vet, it was too late.
“If it had been brought in when it first happened, it could have been saved.”
She has also worked on a four-month case involving an abandoned horse and 30 chickens, relying on members of the community to help care for the animals.
Then there are the cases that are simply gruesome.
On a roadside in Okupu, we come across a collection of animal carcasses, skulls and other remains dumped in the bush.
Tracey says sheep and cattle carcasses had been dumped there over a sustained period, along with seafood remains.
The material should have gone into an offal pit.
DOC became involved and cameras were installed. The people responsible were subsequently detected.
It is a long way from the image of an animal control officer simply driving around looking for dogs.
Tracey’s role has increasingly become about building a network around animal welfare and responsible ownership.
That includes working with local board members, DOC, police, iwi, schools, vets, airlines, animal shelters, farmers and community volunteers.
It also means dealing with the people at the centre of the job.
Tracey wears a body camera when dealing with dog owners because some encounters can become confrontational.
She says aggressive and non-compliant dog owners are the hardest part of the role.
People have rushed at her, yelled, sworn and abused her.
An obstruction offence can carry a fine of up to $750, but she says she is careful about invoking it because doing so can escalate an already heated situation.
The abuse does not simply disappear when she gets back into the Ranger.
“It takes me like three days or so to process it.”
One particularly bad incident stayed with her for about two weeks.
Social media made it worse.
“I just decided not to look at the comments.”
That is another part of the job that would be different on the mainland.
Tracey has worked in animal management there, where she did not know the people she was dealing with.
“100 per cent, you don’t know anyone in town.”
On Great Barrier, the person she has to warn may be someone she sees at the shop, at the beach or around the community.
She says that makes enforcement more difficult, but it is also why she has spent so much time trying to build relationships before reaching the point of enforcement.
The Doggy Day Out, school visits, community events, desexing initiatives, rehoming work and meetings with local groups are all part of that.
And sometimes, the education works.
One dog owner recently told her: “I really appreciate that you came and talked to me on the beach, because I never would have known all of this.”
For Tracey, that is the part of the job that makes the difficult encounters worthwhile.
“It’s not the dog’s fault. The dogs are all lovely. They’re not the ones that create their behaviour. The dog owner creates their behaviour.”
She says roaming dogs often wag their tails when she collects them because they know they are going to get treats, a blanket and human interaction.
“I’m an animal lover,” she says. “Whether it be cows, chickens, birds, dogs, cats.”
After four years, Tracey says the job is better than when she started.
But she still wants people to understand that the rules are not hers.
“I’m enforcing rules, not making them.”
And she wants the community to understand why they exist.
“We can create an environment where everybody feels safe.”
Not everybody likes dogs, she points out.
“Not everyone wants to be dealing with that.”
For an island with thousands of visitors in summer, an ageing population, nesting seabirds, roaming stock and hundreds of animal management jobs a year, Tracey’s argument is that responsible ownership is not about taking away the freedom that makes Great Barrier what it is.
It is about making sure everyone else gets to enjoy it too.
“We can all enjoy Great Barrier Island as it is intended.”
